Should Little Britain and The Simpsons change with the times?

David Walliams says Little Britain would be unrecognisable if he made it today, while The Simpson’s creators have doubled down on their stereotypical depiction of Apu. Should some shows have their comic licence revoked?

In an interview with the Radio Times, David Walliams has admitted that Little Britain would probably be unrecognisable if it were made today. Following Matt Lucas’s claim that the show featured “a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now”, Walliams said that he would approach sketch comedy differently in 2018 because “it’s a different time”.

Of course he would. Little Britain’s first series came out in 2003 – light years ago in public tastes – and it has aged spectacularly badly. There isn’t a broadcaster in the land now that would now commission a comedy featuring two privately educated white men in blackface or playing a Thai bride called Ting Tong or women with such pronounced mental illnesses that they can only communicate in squawks. Even Come Fly With Me – the Little Britain follow-up where Walliams and Lucas played full-blast stereotypes from Jamaica and Pakistan – felt uncomfortably out of step when it aired in 2010.

Obviously they want to walk it back a little now. Walliams and Lucas are comfortable members of the establishment – Walliams is a beloved childrens’ author, Lucas played Nardole in Doctor Who – so it makes sense for them to express unease about an aspect of their comedy past with which they are now uncomfortable.

And Little Britain wasn’t just a shocking outlier. It was embraced wholesale by the public. It rose through the ranks from BBC Three to BBC One at record speed, being watched by almost 10 million people at its peak. It spawned sold-out tours and blanket merchandise. Its catchphrases were picked up and repeated across the land for years. This was a big, mainstream comedy that people loved. If Walliams and Lucas are holding themselves to account in 2018 for making it, then we should do the same for greedily wolfing it down.

Hari Kondabolu, who has made a documentary interrogating the stereotyping around south Asian character Apu in The Simpsons. Photograph: Al Pereira/WireImage

But it happens. Tastes change, and yesterday’s flavour of the month can quite easily become today’s sock soup. Walliams and Lucas are by no means the only creators confronting the rough edges of their past work, but at least they’ve approached it upfront with candour.

The same cannot be said for The Simpsons. Following Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu – in which he interrogated the legacy of a two-dimensional south Asian character voiced by a white actor doing an impression of Peter Sellers doing an Indian accent – The Simpsons this week responded by having Lisa Simpson directly address the audience by saying, “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?”, which feels like a flat-out refusal to address the controversy.

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What can you do? There’s always Looney Tunes, which now prefaces some of its most retrospectively insensitive cartoons with a legend that reads: “The cartoons you are about to see may depict some of the ethnic and racial stereotypes that were commonplace in American society … These cartoon are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”

Now, this works for Looney Tunes, because those cartoons are 70 years old. A similar legend would even work for repeats of Little Britain. Or The Breakfast Club, now that Molly Ringwald has explained her delicate relationship with it. Or any of the shows being made today that will undoubtedly fall foul of changing tastes in years to come.

But Apu is still part of The Simpsons. He may have been a product of his time in the early 90s, but he certainly isn’t now. If David Walliams can express regret for calling someone a “ching-chong Chinaman” a decade and a half ago, then The Simpsons needs to react with something more meaningful than a shrug.